1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computing equipment management in a data center, and more particularly to rack equipment location in a data center.
2. Description of the Related Art
The modern data center often can be characterized by one or more equipment racks disposed in an environmentally sound room terminating broadband access for a computer communications network. Each rack typically houses several computing components on different shelves or slots defined by the rack. Informational technologists prefer rack mounted computing equipment in order to organize and optimize space utilization in the data center. In particular, the optimization and organization of space can be very important if the equipment must be stored under particular environmental conditions, such as low humidity or low temperature conditions.
In as much as computing components can be obscured within one or more densely packed racks in the data center, tracking the location of each computing component in the data center can be a daunting, albeit necessary task. In this regard, when access to a particular computing component is required, for example in consequence of an alarm emitted by a failing computing component, a system administrator must be able to locate the failing computing component quickly. To facilitate the monitoring and management of rack mounted computing components, system management software can be deployed for use by system administrators. Whereas system management software can monitor components and alert system administrators to impending failure conditions in rack mounted computing components, system management software cannot readily locate the rack mounted computing components in the data center.
At present, systems administrators locate computing components in the data center through manual bar coding schemes and companion databases in which bar code scans of bar codes affixed to components can be matched to a database indicating a physical location of the components in the data center. Recognizing the manual intensive nature of bar coding components, other systems administrators embed an electrical memory within each component in a rack enclosure, each memory storing identification data for the component. The rack enclosure, in turn, can incorporate complementary sensors such that the enclosure can query a proximate component to retrieve the identification data. In consequence, an end user can provide search terms through a user interface to the rack enclosure and an indicator light can illuminate near a component matching the user query.
Knowing the position of computing equipment in a rack enclosure can be helpful, but in a large data center, knowing the position of the rack enclosure itself can be just as important. Specifically, each of power, thermal and acoustic concerns relate directly to the placement of a rack enclosure in a data center. For example, thermal considerations relating to the position of a rack relative to a thermal hotspot in a data center can be important when determining in which computing component to entrust a mission critical workload. As another example, “noisy” racks can be dispersed amongst “quiet” racks to avoid a clustering of noisy elements in the data center. As yet a further example, the thermal signature of each rack can be measured so as to ensure an even distribution of “hot” racks relative to “cool” racks to avoid an overly hot location in the data center.